Dragged Across Concrete is a fantastic title for a movie, particularly one with an entertainment-as-gruelling-assault-course approach. This is a long, slow film about violence and killing in which two cops, Gibson and Vaughn, get suspended for being overly violent - or more accurately getting caught on film being overly violent - during the arrest of a scumbag drug dealer. With time on their hands, Gibson comes up with a scheme use their profession expertise and knowledge to get a little extra compensation.

Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99,Bone Tomahawk) has the most contrary, defiant style of any mainstream American filmmaking. He makes long, violent films which don't seem to have any great need to be long or violent. (During the film, just as I was thinking that this third film was much less extreme than his previous two, a character gets brutally disembowelled.) He has the subject matter of an exploitation filmmaker, but he delivers it with a prim reserve. In DAC the camera remains static throughout. There's something very passively aggressive in that and the film builds up enormous amounts of tension and pent up anger. He includes scenes that no other filmmaker would think to include, and gives them more time than any other would allow. It's enthralling but from a distance; are you gripped by this story or just wound up?

Dragged is methodical, long and detailed, and yet inscrutable and oblique. There seems to be no governing intelligence to it, no overview. I wonder if maybe Zahler read The Dice Man at an impressionable age and decided to apply its rationale to his screenwriting. That would account for the randomness of the plotting and the wild variations of quality. Zahler has a zingy way with dialogue but at times he will place the most clunky op-ed pieces into the mouth of his characters. For example, Gibson's wife bemoans how dangerous their poor, predominantly black neighbourhood has become and says that she never thought that she would be racist and she was as liberal as it was possible for an ex-cop to be.

For the most part the film is grindingly nihilistic, a vision of a mean and unjust society, but there are the occasional lurches into sentimentality. It sways between being MAGA Republican, and socially inclusive Democrat. It's a sermon, a long solemn sermon that doesn't have any view on right or wrong. I can take being dragged across concrete but only if I'm being dragged somewhere over that concrete.